Grid-friendly Starsim production scripts

Since the production activity of STAR is migrating to, and eventually will end up running mostly in the Grid environment, this necessitates modification (which often means simplification) of the production scripts we use when running on a local or another "traditional" Unix farm facility. Here is an example of the script we have successfully used to run a Pythia simulation on the Grid (utilizing the Fermilab facility), as well as the SunGrid, with cosmetic modifications.

A few things worth noting:

• The bulk of the script has to do with establishing the Pythia settings which are often required in the simulations requested by the Spin PWG; the starsim proper part is located on top is is uncomplicated; it invloves dynamic loading of the necessary libraries, setting up the beam interaction diamond parameters ets
• The script needs the contents of the tarball (listed on the bottom of the page) located in its working directory; this "payload" contains the Starsim executable as well as a few shared libraries and accessory scripts necessary for its function. To be able to run on the Grid, therefore, on needs to
  • Transfer the tarball and make provisions for extraction of the files
  • Transfer the script below and configure it for submission with a unique serial number (any integer, really)
• The script takes only one argument, which is the serial number of the run. The rest of the run parameters are encoded in its body, which minimizes the chances of human error when submitting a large number of scripts, potentially for many different datasets
• The random number generator is seeded with the serial run number and with the Unix process ID of the script on the target machine, which for all intents and purposes guarantees the uniqueness of a sequence in each run

The contents of the "payload" tarfile: